How Procrastination Leads to Understanding

While preparing for a trout-fishing trip this weekend and a bluegill-fishing trip next week, I faced the usual dilemma. Thousands of fishing flies, yet I couldn’t find what I needed. I knew the ones I wanted were there, I just couldn’t see the hooks for the feathers, so to speak.
It’s a never-ending conundrum for many fly tier/fishers. Like the mystery of dust bunnies under the bed, boxes of flies seem to appear from nowhere. When a trip is pending, rather than dig through countless cluttered boxes to find what you want, you tie more flies, thus perpetuating the problem. In extreme situations, I’ve been known to purchase more boxes rather than try to empty ones I have.
Now, I had to get a grip on this problem. I don’t fish for bluegills (bream to you readers south of Cincinnati) often enough, so I like to get it right. As fighters, pound for pound, a bluegill is a formidable foe. If they grew as large as large-mouthed bass, we’d probably never land them on a fly rod.
Bluegill are the first fish I can remember catching. It’s that way with most fishers. A few years ago my mother declared the bluegill was our “family fish.” If we had a Coat of Arms there would probably be crossed fins on it.
About the same time as mom declaring the bluegill our family fish, I made a silent celebration of what would have been my dad’s 100th birthday. I took his now-restored bamboo fly rod and drove over to a small lake in Indiana near his home town. The picturesque spot I remembered from my childhood was surrounded with paved roads and houses. I found a break in the trees and proceeded to catch 101 bluegills. It’s not that I’m good, it’s more a function of the fish being easy. Those 101 (one for each year of his life and one to grow on) fish, if laid tail to head probably would not have stretched to 10 feet.
My current challenge was to prepare a box or two of flies for a day’s outing. I decided to finally do it right. Clean out the old stuff, rearrange the usable flies, and bring some sort of order to the chaos I call my fishing vest.
The end of the story is that I feel much better now, thanks. My breathing has returned to normal. Had I been cleaning up after anyone other than myself, I would have considered tossing the lot and starting over.
What I had tagged to be a two-hour project stretched over two days. When Susan arrived home from work and observed what I had gotten into (on the commandeered dining table) she succinctly observed, “You’ll never have to make another fly—ever.”
If only that were true. Herein lies the dilemma. After all the sorting and categorizing and weeding out the damaged or poorly made flies, I find that many of the basic bugs, the ones I use most often, are missing. A keen observer will note an important fact of fishing, here. I have, probably, thousands of flies, yet tend to fish the same patterns over and over. Why? Because those are the ones that catch fish!
So, why tie up all that exotic stuff?
Because they’re better at catching fishermen, I suppose.



Bringing chaos to order.